Amid increasing media support for Willie, two articles have raised the peculiarity of the State’s reluctance to embrace DNA testing for Willie.

Andrew Cohen, an award winning USA legal analyst and commentator, has written a lengthy article which concludes,

“It is hard to understand what Mississippi is afraid of. Either the testing will incriminate Manning, or it could help break the case in a new direction. Either way we’ll know more than we do now about what happened that awful night in 1992. If Manning is executed next week without those results, if his sorry story ends here without us knowing whether that scientific evidence incriminates or exonerates him, his ghost won’t just haunt Mississippi forever. It will surely impact the national debate over how much we are willing to know about the truth of these cases, and about the men we are condemning to death.”

In an article written by the founders of The Innocence Project attention is drawn to the similarities between Willie’s case and previous ones, in which DNA evidence has been used to exonerate convicted inmates. The article highlights the potential of DNA testing to reveal the identity of the true perpetrator, and muses,

“As the dissenters noted, given that it is alleged that two perpetrators committed the crime, it’s puzzling that the district attorney is so resistant to testing.”